7 Time Consuming Marketing Tasks You Should Automate Today

Marketing technology is evolving at a never seen before pace, helping businesses reach more potential customers and engage better with their existing ones. But if you’re still one of those who maintain excel sheets and execute manual outreach, is is time to rethink your marketing efficiency strategy.

Automation isn’t about magically running the show on the digital front without having to do anything. It only means using the right marketing technology to reduce the manual efforts of teams to save time and improve conversions.

According to a post on WSJ, companies today are using automation to give a boost to their marketing efforts as well as reach out their potential customers better. The post talks about automating activities such as website and content management, email marketing, customer segmentation, lead filtering, digital advertising and social media marketing.

The increasing number of platforms has definitely increased the number of opportunities every marketer gets to address his audience. But it has also increased the amount of noise, making it hard for businesses to remain visible digitally. They need to put in 10 times more marketing efforts to consistently reinforce their value proposition to their target audience. And that automatically means, a lot more work.

So here are 7 time consuming marketing tasks that you should automate now:

1. Blog promotion

With content marketing taking the centerstage, it is impossible to compromise on the quality of content to save time. According to a report by Nectafy, their inbound marketing professionals spent about 45% of their time writing, editing and updating web content. But a post by Expert Derek Halpern states that a successful content piece is the one that you spend 20% time creating and 80% promoting.

2. Social media

While engaging in conversations with your social media followers cannot be automated, there are tools that can take off the load of having to curate industry news and trends, and schedule them to be published on the various channels. Understanding what you can automate improves the efficiency of the marketer.

Here’s what social media automation offers:

content curation and recommendations based on industry keywords

ability to analyse social media efforts

social listening in real time

sales and marketing intelligence for smarter business processes

image courtesy: Buffer

3. Email marketing

Since mass mailing or broadcast messaging is completely out of the picture, it is important for marketers to segment their email lists and target their leads accordingly. Now manually reaching out to different segments at different time intervals can be a daunting task. Email automation makes it easy to manage your contacts database, segment it and create a regular email schedule for each.

Email marketing automation enables marketers to execute personalized campaigns for various objectives – the top most being able to reach out to more prospects.

4. Behavioural triggered emails

According to Econsultancy, only 20% of marketers make use of behaviourally triggered email marketing. This tactic gives marketers potential to build meaningful relationships with their prospects and existing customers based on the actions they take.

Here’s what you can use mature behaviourally triggered emails for:

subscription and unsubscribe confirmation

follow up emails for converted leads

product/service recommendations post purchase

reminder emails

image courtesy: The Newspaper Works

5. Lead management

According to a post on HubSpot, automated lead management processes guarantee a significant increase in ROI – the average noted being 10% in 6 to 9 months. Manual lead management can be a daunting task, that results in negligible sync in the marketing and sales processes. Automation tools make managing leads much simpler and accurate.

Here’s what automating lead management gets you:

automatic lead qualification

sales and marketing handoffs based on lead scores

automatic lead profiling

personalized recommendations for repeat site visitors

enables reconversions

6. A/B testing

Integrating A/B testing to an automation tool can boost the potential for qualified lead conversion. Consistently testing your website and campaigns helps businesses improve them to match their customer needs. While the integration might seem daunting to small businesses, it will give you the ability to design marketing experiments, gather results and analyze with minimum manual effort.

Here’s what automating A/B testing enables you to do:

testing call-to-actions

split testing forms

testing emails and email schedules

comparative testing of website elements

7. Reporting and data analytics

With enormous amount of data available to us today, most marketers have a hard time understanding the analytics tool and deriving actionable insights from it. But in an ever demanding and ever changing market, it is important for marketers to quickly identify market opportunities for driving traffic, leads and customers.

With an automated analytics tool, businesses can ensure that every team member has access to the right metrics on a real time basis.

Analytics automation provides you with actionable:

site analytics

email analytics

social media analytics

closed loop analytics

Over to you

While adopting an automation tool is kind of becoming a necessity today, it is also important for businesses to first identify their needs. This helps choose the right automation tool for the right process, and makes onboarding easier as well.

What other marketing tasks do you think should be automated for efficiency? Feel free to contribute to this post by dropping a comment in the box below!